An Army Of We.

From Hernandez’s viewpoint, international aid workers from countries such as Spain, Japan, Israel, and the United States were working at a dangerously slow pace. Hernández placed more trust in civilians, such as the carpenters, electricians, and welders who had responded to volunteers’ messages. The lamps, shovels, and dust masks were distributed from volunteers’ tents. The food that volunteers provided for the hundreds of people on site, including the government’s uniformed forces, was prepared in their own homes.

The modern security state exists, in part, because the people decided they needed a larger-scale response to large-scale traumatic events than they as individuals were able to provide. When a really big fire and a rising crime rate was the problem, the people got together and appointed members of their community to act as firefighters and police officers and solve those problems.

What happens when the people themselves can self-organize faster than the agencies that were supposed to solve those problems? What happens when the people who were supposed to solve the problems become the problem itself?

As the saying goes, the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. Maybe now we’re seeing what happens when the internet has to route traffic to damage in order to repair it.